Posts Tagged ‘Gillman Barracks’

As we continue our look back over the year, today’s Best of 2015 selection comes from regular contributor Tori Bush: “Marilyn Goh’s review of Tomás Saraceno’s Arachnid Orchestra poetically explores the interspecies beauty found in spiderwebs’ organic forms, but also reveals a deeper truth about the act of creation—the chaos and conformity of art found also in nature: ‘The web begins with a single thread flung into[…..]

Framed against a starlit sky, two female figures with feathered hair and large, limpid eyes sit astride blue and purple kangaroos. Their lush, naked bodies are stark white against a vibrant canvas of marks, lines, and dots. They stare out of pictorial space into an unknown distance, with their detached gazes separated from the viewer’s own perusal of them. Disengaged from us, their distance forms[…..]

The gallery hums with screechy sounds resembling acoustic feedback, punctuated by random bursts of bass and cartoonish sound effects. The soundscape is queasily amorphous and disorienting, built on dissonance and the chaotic rhythms resonating from a handful of arachnids that have woven fine, thick webs around delicate wire frames. Featuring a plethora of spiderweb sound installations, Tomás Saraceno’s latest show Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions is[…..]

In the 21st-century lexicon of urban development, the term utopia has all but vanished from the descriptors of a contemporary city. It’s more comfortably consigned to the archaic vocabulary of 18th-century academia. Yet it remains a silent ideological underpinning of economic policies, an elusive goal that governments strive toward but leave unacknowledged—seen, for instance, in laws forbidding “transgressive” behavior, constant political entanglements, or even in perpetual urban[…..]

“Grids punctured with crosses in varying patterns” is perhaps the best—and admittedly, the most simplistic—way of summing up Ding Yi’s oeuvre. Ivory Black at the ShanghArt gallery is his latest iteration of these basic, severely geometric forms, in varying shades of blue, black, and white hues, distinguished only by date and serial number. Like an astronomer’s chart of the night sky, Ding’s gridded, ordered forms[…..]

Annexed by Russia in 1782 during the reign of Catherine the Great, Sevastopol became an important naval base to the Russian Black Sea Fleet only to fall decades later to allied British, French, and Turkish troops during the Crimean War (1853–56) after a long, protracted siege that lasted eleven months. During the existence of the Soviet Union, the famous fortress city was transferred to the Ukrainian[…..]

“Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful images and associations. As the cradle of the human race, it would alone have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it… [the] mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, &c., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in[…..]